I finally got a chance to dive into Sarah Waters' work and I am content. I have made a special note that the fall season really is the best time to experience her work, so I'm looking forward to Carl's RIP Challenge this year even more so.

BookLust reviewed the audiobook and as I was coming off audios which really weren't up my alley, I went ahead and downloaded The Little Stranger. This Gothic tale had the right amount of spooky atmosphere, psychological thriller, and bump-in-the-night ghost story tale to wonderfully keep me a bit on edge when I'd listen to it in the car on a cold and dark night.

Dr. Farady has a long history with Hundreds Hall, a rambling and sprawling English manor that has seen better days. When once his mother used to work there in the prime of pre-World War II life, the post-war era certainly has a crumbling result, both to the home and to the family. With only two servants now supporting the house, and the Ayers family living an eccentric life, Dr. Faraday's relationship begins. It's a slow and quiet build-up of eerie tension and with Dr. Faraday building an uncomfortable attachment to the house and family, there is the sense that perhaps he is an unreliable narrator. Although he delivers the events as they happen to him and the family, part of me questioned whether or not I should believe him. Needless to say, that contributed to the success of the disturbing tale.

Simon Vance was a phenomenal narrator, and you may recall that while I didn't like the story of Dr. No, I finished the audio only because of Simon Vance.

Fans of Asylum by Patrick McGrath will be pleased with this story.

Others said:
BookLust
Prairie Horizons

Publisher: Penguin Audio
Release Date: 5/8/2009
Audio Time: 15 hours, 54 minutes
Narrator: Simon Vance

FTC Disclosure: I purchased this book from Audible.com

About the Author

Sarah Waters, a Welsh novelist, is the author of five novels: Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith, The Night Watch, and The Little Stranger. All of them have either already been adapted for television, or the film rights have been optioned.

Visit the Author:

• On her website

When Gillian Flynn recommends that The Next Time You See Me, by Holly Goddard Jones, is an "astoundingly good novel," I know I have to read it. Many of you know just how much I love the dark and twisted writings of Gillian Flynn, especially Gone Girl.

There are so many incredible things quietly and eerily happening through Holly Goddard Jones' debut novel. It's a story filled with the loneliest of people in a small town in Kentucky, and when hard-partying Ronnie goes missing, her sister, Susanna, is the only one who notices and cares. While the rest of the town struggles through their own deep secrets and insecurities, Susanna worries for her sister, her husband, daughter, and the feeling of missing out on life. As Tony Joyce, prior potential major league ballplayer and crush for Susanna, now detective, becomes involved in her missing sister's case, the intensity of the search builds and each person becomes crucial to the town itself and not just to the disturbing details of Ronnie and where she may be, or what may have happened to her. In fact, in truly dark and twisted fashion, the author depicts Roma, Kentucky as almost its own personality, a bruise on the state with its dismal factories and lost dreams.

The Next Time You See Me is incredibly well written. It is engaging in its sadness, the quiet tales of each character's misery or resentment or the feeling of missing out on life itself are all deeply felt by the reader. Probably the most disturbing sections were not just the complete dejection of Wyatt and lost love, but the teenagers in the middle school who Susanna teaches. Emily and Christopher, each on opposite sides of the spectrum of popularity,  simultaneously deal with their own internal tortures and confusion, but Christopher's bullying of Emily is disgusting, perhaps drawn out by the evil figurehead of popularity which can be its own evil beast. Christopher is almost incapable to believe his own confidence and choose to go the opposite way from his girlfriend and friends, and not hurt others. Peer pressure is a dirty thing, and Christopher is not just the leader of it, but a victim to it as well. With the many secrets Emily keeps however, one could almost understand why she is shunned by the larger part of society, which also peel back the layers of why it hurts so badly when she is tormented; the question a reader might ask themselves is "Would I think she was weird, too?" It's not fair, and it's a dark part of "humanity" that is questioned. Perhaps you won't like what you see of yourself.

A common theme throughout is bullying. While it's much more pronounced and currently relevant when represented in Emily's character, it's also portrayed in adulthood with Wyatt and Sam. The book could almost be a dire predicament of what could happen if bullying goes unchecked, no matter what age.

The Next Time You See Me is a quiet and brutally honest story, one that keeps you flipping the pages. If I could have sat uninterrupted for an afternoon, I easily could have finished it in one sitting. Needless to say, it was a book I always took with me on errands: in doctors' offices, nail appointments, waiting in the car to pick people up, and more. I highly recommend this to anyone, especially those who enjoy Gillian Flynn and Chevy Stevens.

Others said:

My Friend Amy

Publisher: Touchstone (a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.)

Release Date: 2/12/2013

Pages: 372

FTC Disclosure: I received a finished copy from the publisher for my honest review.

About the Author

Holly Goddard Jones is the author of the short story collection Girl Trouble. Her work has appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South, Tin House magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2013 recipient of The Fellowship of Southern Writers' Hillsdale Award for Fiction and a 2007 recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and lives in Greensboro with her husband, Brandon, and two rowdy dogs. The Next Time You See Me is her first published novel.

Visit the author:

• On her website
• On Facebook
• On Twitter
• On her blog

So here I am, trying to somehow fit blogging back into my regular day-to-day, and I log back into Google Reader to catch back up with everyone... and I am greeted with a fairly jarring message that Google Reader is all sorts of done come this July. Wha?

The first questions that flitted through my disappointment were:

1. How am I going to organize the blogs I follow?
2. If I find another reader service, do I have to write down each blog name and manually type it into this new service? What a pain!
3. What is the deal with Google discontinuing their products? First Picnik, the photo-editing site, and now Google Reader? What's next, Gmail? I don't really care about Google+, but if I see Gmail go away, I know I'm going to be just past my tolerance threshold for products I love that get discontinued.

Sigh

So are there alternatives?

With a few helpful searches (on Google! *gigglesnort*) I came across articles that offered alternatives. I've chosen Feedly.com for now.

• Feedly.com: This seems to be the most reliable alternative. It will connect directly to your Google Reader and download content and they have PROMISED that they will continue successful migrations past the July 2013 retirement of Google Reader. I started using it today and I really like the format. Visually, it's a lot prettier to view and doesn't seem so boring, like Google Reader was.

Here are two screenshots of what my Feedly looks like. Not bad, right? I'm not sure what their process is for certain articles or blogs to be "featured," but you can see on the right-hand side that there is an initial list of most recent blog posts. Then, you can click a different button and view all posts that are brand new in almost the exact same perspective as Google Reader, but it looks so much nicer. You can change the colors in the appearance as well. 

So the bottom line is that while it makes sense for Google to streamline their efforts to focus on a few products versus spreading themselves too thin and having too many products, thus watering down their internal efforts to continue to be a powerhouse, it's still not fun for the average consumer/blogger reader like you and me. For now, I'm going to play with Feedly.com for a few weeks and see if I like it. Doesn't seem so bad right now.

Any other services you prefer to use for blog reading that you can recommend to everyone?

Prior to my blogging sabbatical, I eagerly accepted a book from Blue Rider Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), simply because Uncle Stevie (Stephen King) blurbed it and pronounced it with "I've written some "secrets of a small New England town" books, and in The Burn Palace, it's as if Stephen Dobyns is saying--very gently--'Hey Steve…this is how you really do it.'"

Well, how could I turn that down?

Brewster, Rhode Island is a town where not much happens, until a newborn baby is kidnapped from the maternity ward of the hospital and replaced with a snake. The events unleashed are a whirlwind of confusion, murders (with a scalping!), allusions to something not quite right lending itself to rumors of Satanism, and the like, and Woody the cop with his partner, Bobby, are just two of the many characters that move through the chaos to find the answers of the kidnapping, subsequent murders, and rumors of shape-shifting wolves.

Make no mistake, there's a lot going on in this story. There are so many characters (a la The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling) that it takes a little while to recall exactly who everyone is, but once you do, they are all easily recognizable. Each character serves a purpose to the story, and it moves quickly with each scene and shocking moment. Stephen Dobyns is not nothing if not an expert on creating an unsettling atmosphere and depicting slowly-building tiny-town hysteria.

I've not read anything like this in a while. The description of the town is delivered as though you are reading a short intro to the stage play version of the story, and it then moves to perspectives of each character, whether primary or background players to the story. There is a casualness to the writing style that, while might not necessarily be my favorite way to deliver a tale, made for a quick read that certainly kept me interested in the end result.

Quick sample:

Now, like an airborne camera, we move back from the hospital, which is called Morgan Memorial here in the town of Brewster, Rhode Island. The sky is mostly clear, and the three-quarter moon lets us see the town under a milky light. A stiff wind out of the northwest energizes the few clouds, tugs the fall leaves and sends them swirling. Windows rattle, and bits of paper and dead leaves swirl down the streets. Already the temperature has dropped to freezing, and those folks who haven't covered their tomatoes are going to lose them. But isn't that often a relief? With the garden gone, except for the Swiss chard and winter squash, it's just one less thing to take care of. (p.4)

I do, however, humbly disagree with Uncle Stevie's blurb that "this is how you really do it," but I do maintain it was an interesting story that grabbed my interest. I may quibble with how two main characters fell in love, since it was a little bit stereotypical of a romance novel in that sense, but the author delivers with creativity and uniqueness and it's obvious this author has a strong fan base for a  very good reason.

Looking for some light, mystery-thriller reading at the beach this spring? This might be right up your alley.

Others said:
S. Krishna's Books

The Unabridged Chick

Publisher: Blue Rider Press, a member of Penguin House USA
Release Date: 2/7/13
Pages: 464

FTC Disclosure: I received a finished copy from the publisher for an honest review.

About the Author

Stephen Dobyns is an American poet and novelist with over twenty fiction novels published. He currently resides in Westerly, Rhode Island.